Page 13 of Bearly Yours
He turned and leaned against the oven, completely comfortable despite the fact that the stove was giving off a lot of heat, and the flames on the front burners were turned on for the chili and the vegetables. “Hebroke it. I dumped him in the big dumpster. My kitchen staff happened to be dumping a bit of trash at the same time.”
“Okay...“
He smirked. “A lot of it was slippery. When he tried to climb out, he fell and broke his arm.”
I groaned. “What did Sheriff Finn say?”
“He fined me a little for the assault, and then suggested it might be a good idea to throw away that marble gryphon statue by the front river walk if the mage ever found himself in my dumpster again.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. That really sounded like Finn. “And King Draven?” Roarke had told me that King Draven had been so swamped now that Draven was the Vampire King, capital V and K, that Roarke had asked him to step down from the Council for a while until the vampires were calmer, and Draven’s rule was more sure.
When he’d first become king last December, we’d had so many vampires visiting Moonhaven it’d looked like a vampire convention.
Humans, I think, did that. They called it cosplaying. I shook my head. Why they wanted to pretend to be a predator that could rip out someone’s throat I didn’t understand, but they were interesting like that.
“Draven is Draven.” And with that enigmatic statement, Roarke went to prepping another dish for our meal rotation this week.
“Can you make me the hummus and cheesy pita bread that I love?” I asked, clasping my hands in a pretty-please plea and batting my eyelashes.
Roarke smirked and nodded his chin toward the bag that he’d yet to unpack. “Already there. You ask for it every week.”
I felt mildly insulted that I was so predictable. I peeked into the bag and took out a big, sealed, glass dish of hummus and a bag of my bread. “You never know. I’ve been getting a craving for those fat, warm pretzels and that nacho cheese sauce lately, I could have requested that.”
His azure and opal eyes glanced my way as his hands continued to prep what looked like an Indian dish called Mughlai Chicken, if I had to guess.
Roarke was an eclectic eater, and while I usually favored more traditional American fare, he encouraged me to try new dishes. Even though I grumbled, I had to admit that I loved most of what he cooked. He seemed to have an amazing memorybecause whenever I didn’t care for something, he never made it for me again.
When we were just starting out as friends, I’d worry I’d hurt his feelings when I didn’t like something, but after a while, I’d figured out that he wasn’t that sensitive. He allowed for personal taste, and if I didn’t like something, it wasn’t a big deal. This gave me the freedom to taste the unique dishes he made for us each week, because I felt like I could give them a thumbs up or down without offense.
“Big pretzels are easy. I can make those for our movie night this week, with some homemade jalapeno cheese sauce.”
He was seriously making me hungry. My stomach snarled in anger that I had all of this amazing food around me, but hadn’t fed it yet. Roarke, who had the ears of a bat, quickly rinsed his hands, then made me a sub sandwich, which he slid across the bar to me.
My irises were probably heart shaped as I stared at it. It looked delicious. “You’re the best,” I said, taking a huge bite. I had to wait to finish chewing before I could speak again. “Thank you. Is this movie night going to be here again?” I asked with a raised eyebrow, picking off a piece of lettuce and popping it in my mouth. “I’m starting to get my feelings hurt. You never invite me over to your place.”
Roarke stopped what he was doing and turned to me. I was kidding. Mostly. But part of mewashurt that in the few years we’d been friends, he’d never invited me to his house. I knew approximately where it was, but... Yeah. There was a smidgen of hurt there.
Roarke was still studying me, and I wanted to fidget, or else shove the whole sandwich into my mouth. I hated it when he did his soul-read thing. Dragons were the only paranormal being that could read a being’s soul, other than an empath.
But while an empath was limited to current emotions, dragons were not. I had the feeling that was one of the main reasons that Roarke had befriended me a few years ago. He’d done his soul-read thing on me and decided I was decent and interesting. Or pathetic and he felt sorry for me. If it was the second option, I seriously never wanted to know.
Roarke wiped his hands on the dish towel sticking out of his jeans and pulled a sticky pad and pen toward him. He wrote his address in a familiar masculine scrawl and pushed it across the counter toward me, then went back to his Indian dish prep as though he hadn’t just given me the keys to the kingdom.
I gaped at the note, clutching it to me like it was a dragon’s egg, precious and rare.
222 Bayview Rd.
“But there is no Bayview Rd,” I said in confusion. I was very familiar with Moonhaven. We didn’t have a Bayview. We had an Oceanside, but no Bayview.
Roark’s lips twitched. “Plug it into your GPS.”
I scowled at him, pulled my phone from my back pocket, and plugged it in. Sure enough, it was there. I scanned the topographical map and blinked to be sure that what I was seeing wasn’t some hallucination.
The topographical map started at the pinned location, and then panned to include the street.
It was the only house on the street, and it was a verylongstreet.
Roarke’s lips twitched at my dumfounded expression, but his hands stayed busy as he separated food into glass dishes with lids so we could divide the spoils between us for the week. “The drive up to my house is so long that the town elected to give it its own street name years ago. It’s all on my property. There’s a gate with a code once you turn off Pacific. The code is 0814.”
